“It’s all built on trust, and we are so very close,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson whispered to his wife, at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. “Morgan Stanley and Goldman are an inch away. If the other banks stop trusting them… if they pull back on inter-bank lending, it’s over in a matter of hours. From there, it goes too fast to stop. A run on not just one bank, but on the whole system. Average people wondering ‘is my money safe?’ They start pulling their cash, and then lines outside the banks, smashed ATMs. A couple of weeks, there’s no milk in the stores.”

That’s how actor William Hurt declaims it anyway. He plays Paulson in Too Big to Fail, which premiered on HBO earlier this week. It’s one offering of a recent bull market in films about a dark chapter in our recent history where the stakes were almost as high as the Cuban missile crisis. Both episodes involved middle-aged male power-junkies gambling with our destinies, and both almost resulted in catastrophic explosions.

The eleven feature-length movies that have now been made give an excellent picture of how and why the 2008 crisis happened, and who was to blame. Because the stories are told by filmmakers skilled in the art of explaining complex issues in a clear and entertaining way, watching these films is a fine way of getting a grip on what exactly happened – and seeing the imminent dangers we still face.

First out of the blocks was Michael Moore’s documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, released in October 2009. Comparing America to the late Roman Empire, the world’s most commercially successful documentarian identified Ronald Reagan, and the pro-business lobbyists that pushed through financial deregulation, as the start of the rot. He documents the “casino mentality” that grew up on Wall Street, and led to the untrammeled development of “credit derivatives.” Although claiming not to understand the term, Moore clearly explains how banks lured Americans into taking out attractive-looking mortgages, and then bundled those home loans as “mortgage-backed securities” which then became traded. Moore concludes that Wall Street has ensured that the system is so unintelligible so as to “get away with murder.” He points his finger at US Congressmen who accepted favorable mortgages in exchange for not regulating the market. He calls the passage of the 2008 bailout of $700 billion proposed by Hank Paulson as a “financial coup d’état”. Moore’s denunciation of greed climaxes in a scene where he goes to Wall Street to carry out a citizen’s arrest on the board of the insurance company AIG, and to demand that investment bank Goldman Sachs return $10bn in cash to the American people.

Although the film is now the ninth highest grossing documentary in history, Moore’s leftist slant made little impression on independent or conservative viewers. His film was almost immediately followed by the more balanced, if equally damning, PBS Frontline, The Warning, which laid the blame at the feet of the Clinton Administration. It focused on Brooksley Born – a rare female character in the narrative – who was head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from 1996-99. Born had warned Clinton about the dangers of derivatives – foresight that might have stopped the 2008 crisis — but she was brutally silenced by then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan, who was Fed Chairman from 1987-2006, is singled out by seven of the eleven films as a leading cause of the crisis. It was Greenspan who assumed that real estate prices would always go up, and thus helped create the housing bubble. A fan of Ayn Rand and free-markets, Greenspan is the central villain in The Flaw, which was named after a remark he made while giving testimony to Congress in October 2008: “I found a flaw,” he confessed. “I was shocked because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

The Flaw, which comes out in UK cinemas on June 7th after a long search for distribution, is produced by Stephen Lambert, the Brit who was at the center of the 2007 “Queengate” controversy when Lambert’s company RDF released a trailer for a TV show that seemed to show Queen Elizabeth II badmouthing photographer Annie Leibowitz. After being forced to resign, Lambert moved to Los Angeles, and set up Studio Lambert; this is their first feature.

The film does its best to explain a core factor in the crisis: “moral hazard.” Economist Paul Krugman describes it as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.” It really just means cheating at gambling. The Flaw bills itself as “a financial whodunit” and suggests that everyone who helped the American people to buy into the lie of everlasting prosperity – the banks; the regulators; Congress; Presidents Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and, to an extent, Obama – have blood on their hands.

The most critically successful of the documentaries about the crisis has been Inside Job, which won this year’s Oscar for best documentary. Narrated by Matt Damon, the film features an authoritative range of interviewees, including brothel madams who serviced Wall Street execs; current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke; then-President of the New York Federal Reserve, Timothy Geithner; Congressman Barney Frank, George Soros, and the ironically self-righteous Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF. The film’s lucid analysis inspires an awe-struck rage at what director Charles Ferguson calls the “systemic corruption” in the financial sector.

After tracing a similar history of deregulation as the other films, Inside Job unravels the conflicts of interest in the financial world, ranging from academics who receive money as consultants, but do not disclose those payment in their writings; to credit rating agencies and regulators staffed by former employees of the very companies they are supposed to be independently overseeing.

The film is toughest on Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that has supplied the US government with so many of its financial leaders and thus earned itself the nickname ‘Government Sachs’. The most damning portrait is of Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman, whom President George W. Bush appointed Treasury Secretary in 2006. To comply with conflicts of interest rules, Paulson was forced to sell all his Goldman stock, worth around $500mn. To sweeten the pain, Paulson was excused capital gains tax on the sale of those assets. That effectively amounted to a staggering $200 million signing bonus. The bailout that Paulson then devised gave Goldman $10bn in direct aid, and another $12bn in indirect assistance, through the AIG bailout. To cap it all, Paulson appointed Edward Liddy, a former director at Goldman, as the new head of AIG.

Two films, both with the same name, identify the US Congress as the Voldemort of the story. Casino Jack, a narrative feature film, stars Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff, the financial super-lobbyist who allegedly bribed at least twenty members of Congress, including Republican majority whip Tom DeLay, a major advocate for financial deregulation. The documentary version, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, is directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Book also did a superb job in unraveling intricate financial webs of deceit.

Both films suggest that Abramoff was not just one bad apple, but one small cog in a treacherously designed machine of unfettered greed, where anyone with any power had his snout in the trough.

Gibney returns to the theme of financial avarice in his film Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which came out in November 2010. While documenting the former New York Governor’s fall from power after being caught with a prostitute in an FBI sting that Spitzer had himself devised, Gibney’s real focus is on the forces ranged against him. We learn how it was Spitzer who, on taking office in 1999, took exception to the way investment bankers were behaving as Masters of the Universe, and declared war on them by devising ways to regulate them. Wall Street fought back. Hank Greenberg, CEO of AIG, allegedly hired a PR firm to smear Spitzer, and Republican political consultant Roger Stone, a self-declared “GOP hitman”, was hired to bring Spitzer down. When Spitzer finally resigned, cheers erupted on trading floors. At the heart of the film is Gibney’s candid, in-depth interview with Spitzer, who, while admitting to his own personal errors of judgment, incisively demonstrates how hard it is for any politician to regulate the financial system.

In the wake of these documentaries, A-list actors and directors stepped up to dramatize the crisis. Biggest of these has been Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,a sequel to the 1987 Oliver Stone film that won Michael Douglas an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gecko. Stone and Douglas said they were persuaded to make a sequel after learning that 21st century Wall Street wannabes actually idolized Gecko.

The film starts with the release from prison of Gecko, who finds that “greed is not only still good, it’s legal.” Stone and Douglas reportedly based Gecko’s new persona on two real-life Wall Street chief executives who had played big roles in the 2008 crisis: Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase.

A more subtle dramatization of the impact of the sub-prime lending debacle can be found in Margin Call, a star vehicle for Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Demi Moore. I went to see the film at the Sundance Film Festival, but, together with all the press, was locked out of the first screening after Harvey Weinstein packed the theater with his own people to try and keep its contents a secret. He eventually lost a bidding war to Lionsgate, and I saw the film at its world premiere on the last day of Sundance.

It’s a boardroom thriller, set in a New York investment bank during one 36-hour period in 2008, right before Lehman brothers went down. After one lowly analyst realizes how perilously leveraged the firm is by mortgage-backed securities, the crisis rises up the company’s chain of command, until its CEO, played with icy smoothness by Jeremy Irons, has to helicopter in to impose a terrible solution: the firm must liquidate its mortgage securities by the end of the next trading day. The central character, played superbly by Kevin Spacey, is then faced with an ethical and professional dilemma on how he will respond to the “moral hazard” of the situation. Will he loyally obey the order to sell off toxic shares to a friend at another firm? Will he dump the shares, even though he knows it’s a strategy that will screw millions of home-owners?

Kevin Spacey in Margin Call

The personal impact of the crisis is explored in even more emotional depth in The Company Men, directed by John Wells, creator of The West Wing. It’s a riches-to-rags story of a white-collar executive (Ben Affleck) who is laid off from his high-salary job and forced to take a job as a construction worker with his blue-collar brother-in-law (Kevin Costner). The enemy here is vanity and greed – and it has many echoes with Tom Wolfe’s benchmark critique of Wall Street, The Bonfire of the Vanities. The remedy, as Affleck discovers is a trio of American Values: “Faith, Courage and Enthusiasm”.

The best-written, best-acted film so far is also the most recent, Too Big to Fail, a dramatization of New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name. The characters here are the real people behind the crisis. Director Curtis Hanson, best known for helming 8 Mile and LA Confidential, worked meticulously with actors to assimilate the physical attributes of their roles. The results are impressive, as these photos demonstrate:

Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve

James Woods as Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers

Edward Asner as Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

Evan Handler as Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs

William Hurt as Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary

For Hurt, preparation involved spending actual face time with the Treasury Secretary. According to Hanson, “Paulson invited him to Little St. Simons Island, off of Savannah, to spend a week fishing. Bill even came back armed with his gestures.”

A more favorable image of Paulson emerges than from Inside Job. There’s no suggestion that he’s a Goldman Sachs crony, for example. He shows remarkable humility, when, in his bid to persuade the Congressional Democrats to support the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, he goes down on one knee to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also shows creditable candor: when asked by a staff-member why there was no regulation of the financial system, he replies, “No one wanted it. We were making too much money.”

Another unlikely hero to appear is Britain’s then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, who adamantly refused Paulson’s plea to permit Barclays bank to take over the troubled Lehman Brothers. “We don’t want to import your cancer,” he said, before wishing Paulson a good night and hanging up.

The fool of the story is Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld – played with hapless anger by James Woods. Tragic pride leads him to over-value his firm and to refuse an offer from Warren Buffet to buy shares. “Screw Warren Buffet!” he declares, with staggering hubris. Had he accepted the offer, he might have saved Lehman from bankruptcy, and stopped the ensuing domino effect.

Fuld does do a very rare and unfashionable thing: he criticizes the actual everyday borrowers: “People act like we [bankers] are crack dealers,” he laments. “But nobody put a gun against anyone’s head and said, ‘Hey, nimrod, buy a home you can’t afford and, while you’re at it, buy yourself a boat’.” Almost all the other films are on the side of the everyday borrowers, suggesting that the predatory lenders were to blame.

Too Big to Fail’s opening images are of President Reagan announcing his plans to deregulate the financial markets and, tied with Alan Greenspan, he comes out of the eleven films as Enemy Number One. Reagan’s top partner in the deregulating campaign was, of course, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, herself the subject of a new bio-pic, The Iron Lady. Shooting has wrapped, and the film is now in post-production. Shots of Meryl Streep as Thatcher are mouth-watering:

Meryl and Maggie

A few pages of the script have been leaked. These reveal that the film begins with Thatcher in retirement, haunted by memories of her time in office, especially the tense period leading up to the Falkland/Malvinas War.

The film sparked a bidding war recently at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, with various distributors — Summit, Roadside and Open Road — eventually trumped by the Weinstein Company, who purchased the film from producers Pathe for more than $7 million. Although the only confirmed release date is December 26, in New Zealand, there’s a good chance you’ll have Maggie on your screens by the end of the year.

Whether or not The Iron Lady adds Thatcher to the rogues’ gallery of the 2008 financial crisis, there is one thing that all the other eleven films agree on: we are not yet out of the woods. Too Big to Fail suggests that the entire TARP deal that Paulson brokered was a charade. The banks did not lend more money to investors, as Paulson had instructed them to do. The markets continued to tumble. U.S. unemployment passed 10 percent. Millions of Americans lost their homes.

Inside Job, meanwhile, concludes that the merging of troubled banks with healthy banks did little to resolve the underlying problems. Instead, Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner created a banking oligopoly where ten banks now hold 77 percent of all US bank assets. The Obama administration has declared all ten banks to be “too big to fail” which means that the next time there’s a crisis, the taxpayer may end up bailing them out again.

The probability of that crisis is increased because no real reform has taken place. The US government’s own debt makes the system especially vulnerable. If the Chinese government should call in a chunk of its debts, for example, there really could be no bottom…

Equally disturbing is that, despite the corruption and crimes committed, no one has been held accountable. As Ferguson stated when accepting his Oscar, “three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail — and that’s wrong.”